(5:68) Say to them: 'People of the Book! You have no solid ground to stand
on unless you establish the Torah and the Gospel and all that had been revealed
to you from your Lord.97 Indeed the message revealed to you from
your Lord will aggravate insurgence and unbelief in many of them.98
So do not grieve for those who disbelieve. (5:69) (Know well, none has an exclusive claim to the Truth.) For all those
who believe in Allah and in the Last Day and do good deeds - be they either
believers, Jews, Sabaeans or Christians - neither fear shall fall upon them,
nor shall they have any reason to grieve.99

97. By 'establishing the Torah and the Gospel' is meant observing them honestly
and making them the law of life.

It should be noted here that the Scriptures which comprise the Bible consist
of two kinds of writings. One was composed by the Jewish and Christian authors
themselves. The second consists of those portions which have been recorded as
either the injunctions of God or as the utterances of Moses, Jesus and other
Prophets. Such portions are those in which it has been categorically stated
that God said so and so, or that a particular Prophet said so and so. If we
were to exclude the portions belonging to the first category and carefully study
those belonging to the second we would notice that their teachings are not perceptibly
different from those of the Qur'an. It is true that the second category has
not altogether escaped the tamperings of translators, scribes and exegetes,
and the errors of oral transmitters. Nevertheless, one cannot help feeling that
the teachings embodied in the second category call man to the same pure monotheism
as the Qur'an, that they propound those very beliefs propounded by the Qur'an
and that they direct man to the same way of life as that to which the Qur'an
seeks to direct him. Hence, had the Jews and the Christians adhered to the teaching
attributed in their Scriptures to God and the Prophets they would certainly
have become a truth-loving and truth-oriented group of people and would have
been able to see in the Qur'an that very light which illuminates the earlier
divine Scriptures. There would then have been no question of their abandoning
their religion in order to follow the Prophet (peace be on him). To follow him
would have caused neither break nor discontinuity; they would simply have gone
one stage further along the same road.

98. Instead of reflecting on this seriously and dispassionately, they were
seized by a fit of intransigence which intensified their opposition.